being human

НАУКА | 17 января 2009 | Роджер Смит |

Исследования

Being human

What, however, makes a person a person and not some other thing, like a planet, an animal, a computer or an angel? In order to ask such questions, we need a general heading, general terms, and this is where the words ‘being human’ become useful. To think about the topic ‘being human’ puts, from the beginning, a question mark against any claim that people are, really , this or that. It leaves open for study what humans from different populations or sexes share and in what ways they differ. It encourages us to think that a central aspect of being human is to ask what being human means – to reflect on our own nature. (A number of people have thought that it is this capacity for reflection, mediated by symbol systems and making it possible to change, which makes us different from other things in the material world.) By contrast, if we said that our topic is ‘human nature’, this would presuppose, insofar as we live in a secular scientific age, that the ‘real’ basis of being human is biological. A project on ‘being human’, as opposed to a project on ‘human nature’, allows us to examine the relation between biological forms of knowledge and other forms of knowledge about people. Дарем,  being human,  Enlightenment,  post-colonial studies,  stupidity,  designer drugs